Word: riffraff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Genuine Scrap. Josiah Bounderby (Timothy West) is the apostle of the creed, the poor boy who made good, a man of red-faced bluster and aggressive self-pity. "I'm a bit of dirty riffraff," he brags, "a genuine scrap of rag, tag and bobtail." His young wife Louisa Gradgrind (Jacqueline Tong, who played Daisy in Upstairs, Downstairs] is as much a victim of the times as her husband's workers. Her father (Patrick Allen), who runs what is thought to be a progressive school, has taught her to ignore all feeling and rely only on facts...
...youngsters had left. The same heavy snow leveled a horse barn in Windham, Me., but four horses trapped under the snow and twisted metal were dug out alive. Sturdy North Dakotans of Scandinavian descent, long since inured to cold, broke out booster buttons proclaiming: MINUS 40 BELOW KEEPS THE RIFFRAFF OUT. When West Virginia's Governor Jay Rockefeller insisted on being inaugurated outdoors in Charleston's 0° weather, local wags quipped, "We always figured it would be a cold day in hell when a New Yorker would become Governor here." The situation was hardly funny, however...
...chance has no part in police work"-but his hunches tend to be inspired. These two are supported by a sturdy cast: Fredrik Melander, who has a prodigious memory and spends much of his day in the bathroom; Gunvald Larsson, an impetuous dropout from what he calls "upper-class riffraff;" Einar Rönn, who writes execrable official reports; Per Mänsonn, who is chief in Malmö, where trouble often occurs (and where the Wahlöös lived). Finally, there are the Keystone Klutzes, Kvant and Kristiansson-patrolmen stuck with each other because neither can get along...
...Paris in the twenties--rather it is a Boston brand of boardwalk watching, coffee sipping retreats from the Action that play at the cosmopolitan feeling of being above it all. The Pamplona (on Bow St. next to the Underdog) reverberates with the undertones of the heavies, of intellectual riffraff at its most sincere and heart of heart having it outs. Everybody eavesdrops, it is licensed voyeurism. The Window Shop (56 Brattle St.) is an outdoor cafe that provides a front row bleacher seat as to who's who at the Casablanca (where the preppies hang out for their booze). Grendel...
...sleeper of the current publishing season. A sophisticated thriller, it tracks the downfall of a marginal crook-a Boston gunrunner named Eddie Coyle. The author comes from Boston's South Shore and is a 31-year-old assistant federal attorney for Massachusetts. He knows intimately the riffraff at the edge of organized crime-the pacts and betrayals, the phone calls in bars, the meetings in cafeterias and shopping centers. By using the procedures of surveillance, he is able to achieve a dumbfoundingly authentic atmosphere. Readers feel at once that they have slipped unaware into new and dangerous territory...